Dispersion problem – revisited after 7 months

About 7 months ago I wrote about my dispersion problem. I didn't honored my decision at that time which was to dedicate myself fully to ArgoUML during about one year. For instance, I recently finished some hacking in the friendly user interface for htmled that allows me to say:

python hb2post.py --startdate=2010-06-01 > posts-in-programacao-since-june-1st.txt

Why did I did it? It isn't only dispersion working, it is also a desire to be a better hacker and to know more. But, this takes me away from my dream which is to fulfill one or more remarkable ideas. So, back to initial plan.

But, to see the glass half full instead of half empty, I list all the issues I was involved with in ArgoUML and which are resolved since my decision:

• Issue 5506: ArgoUML fails to start after creating dependency between two user profiles
• Issue 6008: Stereotypes defined in profile dont't stay applied after save and reload
• Issue 6038: multiplicity elements created outside of model at top level
• Issue 5618: C++ module unit tests failing in nightly (headless) build
• Issue 4997: user defined profile that depends from module defined profile fails to load on startup
• Issue 5946: Import AndoMDA Magicdraw XMI file fails (need recursive profile subdirectory search)
• Issue 6077: wrong or missing labels in TagDefinition Property Panel
• Issue 5969: stereotype «cppClass» can be assigned twice after load
• Issue 5041: provide core profiles via the website

Also, looking in retrospective the past months were good for ArgoUML on several areas:

• Linus Tolke finally handled the switch of the ArgoUML license from BSD like to the Eclipse Public License (EPL) 1.0, which means that ArgoUML and ArgoEclipse will move together and that Tom Morris will be more willing to continue to contribute.
• Bob Tarling was the main contributor to ArgoUML 0.30.1 and he was able to achieve the replacement of the old model elements property panels by the new implementation which is based on XML definitions. Originally this was developed by Christian López Espínola in a GSoC 2008 project, but, never before matured enough to be a full and stable replacement of the old implementation. Kudos to Bob :-)
• Tom Morris returned to active ArgoUML contributions, and although he isn't yet as active as before, his overall understanding and detailed knowledge of UML and plenty of ArgoUML components helps a lot when others need guidance such as I did during 0.30.x bug fixing period. In the last period of 0.30.1 development, he even took issue 6008 on his hands and made some big changes to the reference handling of profile model elements which I would have struggled for months to get right. He achieved it in about one week.
• Linus Tolke managed to stabilize the Hudson continuous integration server where ArgoUML nightly builds are executed and continues to maintain the automated builds, project infrastructure and release tasks.
• Thomas Neustupny and Andreas Rueckert are actively evolving the argouml-core-model-euml implementation of the model subsystem (the result of a GSoC 2007 project by Bogdan Ciprian Pistol) and therefore moving ArgoUML towards UML 2.x.
• I'm happy with the progressive stabilization and polishing of the profile subsystem (yet another result of a GSoC 2007 project, this one by Marcos Aurélio).
• ArgoUML's users forum is growing in activity with Thomas Neustupny, Tom Morris, me, daybyter and KiwiCoder being active helpers. Kudos to Lukasz Gromanowski for setting this and the users' wiki for the project and for the continued support. Compared with the argouml-users mailing list the forum is rocking!
• Michiel Van der Wulp continued to support the notation subsystem and the state and activity diagrams and although he isn't so actively contributing as he used to he continues to help with his expertise in these areas.
• There was also the return of previously inactive contributors such as Alexander Lepekhine.

I may be forgetting some relevant contribution and if so drop me a line to update this post. I think that attributing the kudos to contributors is important for the health of the project. Thank you all for continuing to move forward the project and to our users to keep nagging us about the bugs and annoyances :-)